Fox News’ effort to make Chicago protests over the police shooting of Laquan McDonald about black-on-black crime wound up exposing host Leland Vittert as an ignoramus with an anti-black agenda.

Vittert turned a discussion that purported to be about the protests into one about Blacks Behaving Badly. With fake concern for black lives, Vittert “just asked” whether the mainstream media is “intimidated by these protesters and that’s not, why they’re not asking tough questions about, ‘Why aren’t you protesting all of the other black murders that happen inside Chicago?’”

Conservative guest Cal Thomas at least gave kudos to the citizen journalist who leaked the video of McDonald getting shot by police. “16 shots? Come on! He was down after the first shot,” Thomas said. But, he added, “I think you’re absolutely right about this. Black-on-black crime in Chicago is virtually ignored, certainly by the national media.”

Vittert complained about Jesse Jackson putting out a robocall asking people to come out and protest on Black Friday. “Why hasn’t Jesse Jackson put out a robocall telling people to walk the streets in Cabrini-Green and the southside of Chicago and why isn’t the media asking him, ‘Why aren’t you doing anything about what’s killing far more young black teenagers than one, obviously, police officer’s in a lot of trouble now?’”

Unfortunately for Vittert, the other guest, Lynn Sweet, the Washington bureau chief for the Chicago Sun-Times, exposed Vittert as a know-nothing spouting Fox talking points about Jackson, Chicago and the media coverage of black crime.

SWEET: Reverend Jackson has been at the lead of many, many movements to try and stop black-on-black crime. Cabrini-Green, as such, doesn’t exist any more. There has been tremendous coverage of the shootings on the south side by the mainstream media, particularly in Chicago. …There has been tremendous attention to crime in Chicago. I don’t know how any person who is familiar with the situation says that there’s not.

And if you look at national coverage… Mayor Rahm Emanuel was up for re-election in 2015 and I think a part of almost every story about his re-election had been about how he still was combatting, not successfully, all victims, victims of violence on the south side. So I don’t even understand the premise of where you’re coming from on this one, respectfully said.

Rather than argue his point, Vittert fumbled for some other excuse to whitesplain about Blacks Behaving Badly. Vittert asked Thomas whether Emanuel has “been doing everything he can” to deal with black-on-black crime “or is he handling this, the problems of black-on-black crime in Chicago, with kid gloves?”

Thomas had his own whitesplaining dos and don’ts for African American protesters regarding school vouchers and Democrats. He complained that Democrats “will not allow poor African American children to escape from failed public schools… and I think that’s where the protests ought to be.”

And oops, time was up, even though Thomas had two opportunities to speak and Sweet only got one. However, she did say as Vittert closed the segment, “There is a rebuttal to that, sorry we can’t get to it.”

Thomas was complaining about how “Democrats” won’t let “poor African-American children [to] escape from failing schools.”

And exactly WHERE are these “good” schools that the “poor African-American children” are supposed to go? Right-wingers keep harping on vouchers as some sort of magic cure-all but all that vouchers do is to transfer the limited amount of funding for public schools to private and charter schools and, of course, public school funding is limited because a lot of states rely on specific tax sources for funding and way too many voters object to paying even slightly higher taxes. In most cases, private schools charge such high tuition that the vouchers, at best, offset a part of that tuition (which is why so many mostly GOP-voting parents want school vouchers; they vote against “evil government handouts” until they need some of those “evil government handouts”) and, for “poor” students, the parents can’t usually afford to make up the (often sizable) difference for their kids to go to the private schools. (Let’s ignore the inconvenient fact that private schools do NOT have to take any students and a lot of them have unofficial quotas that tend to prevent helping the vast majority of “poor African-American children”—you know, to maintain the school’s “exceptional” character.) As to charter schools, a lot of them have turned out to be nothing more than corporate money-making schemes (plenty of horror stories abound about parents going to get their kids ready for the new school year only to find that the school closed down with no notice). And for some reason, a lot of the charter school horror stories seem to have had a disproportionate impact on those “poor African-American children.”